Is ‘Niu Lai’ The ‘Gunda’ Of China

Every film culture eventually produces a movie so clumsy that it becomes immortal. India had Kanti Shah’s Gunda which was released in 1998. China now has Niu Lai (Here Comes the Cow). Gunda was never meant to be high art. Mithun Chakraborty as Shankar, villains named Bulla and Chutiya, rhyming punchlines, and that unforgettable bicycle-and-revolver fight turned a C-grade action film into YouTube folklore. People did not watch it for craft. They watched it to confirm how far a movie could go and still exist. Decades later, the memes still travel.  Niu Lai follows the same path, only in 3D. Directed by Xin Yumeng and written by his mother Sun Lifang, the 86-minute animation was made over five years by essentially two people, largely on architectural software. A timid calf faints, dreams of a skylark, a snake, a leopard and wolves, then wakes up braver. The models look like early video-game leftovers. Mouths barely move. Pauses last too long. The plot wanders. Released on 5 August 2026 with almost no marketing, it collected a few thousand yuan in its first 10 days. Then clips hit Chinese social media. Mockery became a pilgrimage. Audiences filled halls to see, with their own eyes, how bad animation could be. The film has since crossed 50 million yuan (approx. 1 yuan= Rs14.16); a freak return on a near-zero budget. Gunda and Niu Lai both became communal jokes that people pay to share. One gave India immortal dialogues; the other gave China a handmade cow that looks like a sleep-paralysis demon. Niu Lai is not China’s Ne Zha. It is China’s Gunda: so pathetically made that it became a phenomenon. Watch it to understand why a bad movie can outlive a good one.